Chapter XXVII.

OF THE PROVINCE OF ADEN, AND OF SEVERAL COUNTRIES REPUTED TO BE INACCESSIBLE.

After having spoken of the provinces on the coast, I will now return to some provinces more to the north, where many Tartars dwell, which have a king called Caidu, of the race of Zingis-Khan, but subject to none. These observe the customs of their ancestors, dwell not in cities, castles, or fortresses, but dwell with their king in the fields, plains, valleys, and forests, and are esteemed true Tartars. They have no sort of corn, but live on flesh and milk in great peace. They have multitudes of horses, kine, sheep, and other beasts. There are found great white bears, twenty palms long, black foxes, very large, wild asses, and little beasts called Rondes, which bear the sable furs and variarcolini, and those which are called Pharaoh’s rats, which the Tartars are skilful in taking. The great lakes, which are frozen, except for a few months in the year, are the cause that in the summer it is scarce to be travelled for mire, and therefore the merchants, in going to buy their furs for fourteen days’ journey through the desert, have set up for each day a house of wood, where they barter with the inhabitants, and in winter they use sledges without wheels, and plain on the bottom, rising with a semicircle at the top, or end, which are drawn on the ice by beasts like great dogs, by couples, the sledge-man only with his merchant and furs sitting therein.

At the extremity of the region of these Tartars is a country reaching to the farthest north, called the obscure land, because the most part of the winter months the sun appears not, and the air is thick and darkish as betimes in the morning with us. The men there are pale and squat, have no prince, and live like beasts. The Tartars often rob them of their cattle in those dark months, and, lest they should lose their way, they ride on mares which have colts sucking, which they leave with a guard at the entrance of that country, where the light beginneth to fail, and when they have taken their prey, give reins to the mares, which hasten to their colts. In their long-continued summer, they take many of the finest furs (on occasion, of the Tartars going to rob them), of which I have heard some are brought into Russia. Russia is a great country near that northern darkness. The people are Greek Christians, the men and women fair, and pay tribute to the King of the Tartars of the west, on whom they border. On the east there is plenty of furs, wax, and mines of silver; it reaches, as I was told, to the ocean sea, in which are islands that abound in ger-falcons and falcons.